Free Agents
04 Feb 2024 - 15 Aug 2025
- book by Kevin Mitchell, a neuroscientist who believes in free will. The book is framed as a discussion of agency
My goal in this book is to explore how living things come to have this ability to choose, to autonomously control their own behavior, to act as causes in this world. The key to this effort...is to take an evolutionary perspective. The book therefore tracks how agency evolved...My aim is to show that...we are not limited either to a simplistic physical determinism, in which all causes are located at the level of atoms or quantum fields, or to some kind of magical dualism, where we have to invoke immaterial forces to rescue our own agency (p. xi)
- Although a scientist and a naturalist, he opposes reductionism. It appears he is a kind of emergentist. Which is to say, minds and choices are perfectly real and perfectly natural, but they have their own forms and laws which are simply not the same as the crude physical laws that animate the lower levels of reality. This, in combination with physical indeterminism (a consequence of quantum physics) is enough to give us a workable, naturalistic idea of free will.
- The evolutionary story is that once organisms emerge, so do interests and agents, entities capable of acting on their own behalf. A bacterium has some of these qualities; more complex animals with nervous systems do more.
The more we learn about the mechanisms of perception and cogntion, and in particular, of decision making and action selection, the more mechanistic it all seems and the less there seems to be for the mind to do. (p 8)
But even though our cognitive systems have a physical instantiation, their workings cannot be reduced to this level. We are not a collection of mere mechanisms. As we will see, the nervous system runs on meaning. (p22)
- There should be a name for this very common assumption. You see it everywhere, a sort of axiomatic belief that mechanism is "mere", too lowly to support meaning and minds. This is in the middle of a book that is showing the opposite! Weird. the lowly matter axiom, there, now it has a name, if not a great one.
Brains do not commit crimes: people do (p286)
In a holistic sense, the organism's neural circuits are not deciding — the organism is deciding. It's not a mchine computing inputs to produce outputs. It's an integrated self decideing what to do, based on its own reasons. (p144)
This unpredictability suppors a pragmatic view of seeing the causality as inherent in the organism itself rather than in the machinery within it. (p121)
- The implicit dualism on display rubs me the wrong way. The founding principle of cybernetics, AI, and cognitive science is that minds are machines, very complex machines composed out of submachimes. We don't know exactly how they work or how the thing is put together, but computation at least gives us some idea about how it might work. It is not longer a mystery or shouldn't be. There is nothing "mere" about mechanism.
- I find it weird that a neuroscientist who is giving a book-length description of the evolution of the machinery of mind would talk this way.
- OK this is good:
...the question "Do we have free will?" is more deeply undermined by a lack of clarity of the terms "we" and "have". We cannot profitably approach the question of whether you have free will untill we have answered the much more fundamental question, "What kind of thing are you?" (p17)
- The answer in the book seems to be, highly evolved survival and interest-pursuing entities (I might say machines, I think Mitchell would not). Biological machines taking purposive action in pursuit of their interest is not problematic the way discorporated, transcendential minds are.
- And these entities, while products of long naturalistic processes of evolution, also have the capacity to create themselves, to act on themselves. This circular causality is another root of free will, or something that feels like free will.
- In part he seems to be rediscovering Francisco Varela's notion of autopoiesis, although it is not cited.
The activity of the organism changes the environment and the organism's relation to it. The apparently linear chain of causation is really a loop or series of loops—you can think of it as a spiral stretched through time.
- The phase transition:
For a long time, nothing in the universe did anything. There was a lot goig on, to be sure...its not that nothing happened,—it's that nothing in the universe could be said to be doing any of it. And then, at some point, actors emerged on this stage. Simple lifeless components were somehow assembled into forms that held themselves apart from these general happenings and instaed acted on the world.(p24)
- The Chapter "Choosing" is interesting because it goes into current cognitive theory of actions.
- p135 describes a process of envisioning possible courses of action.
Basal ganglia–cortical loops...at any one level of the nested hierarchy of behavioral control (for goals, plans, actions, or movements), these patterns are effecticely in competition with each other for control of the actual machinery of movement....activity in this simulation loop continues until one action plan emerges as a clear winner (p139)
- He denies compatabilism but I don't quite understand why, or how exactly he differs.
- One argument against determinism that I liked was something like this: if you are a strict determinist, it means that every small detail of the present universe, the structure of every flower and neuron, here and on any other planets, was completely contained in the big bang (or, a bit more concretely, in the universe as it existed immediately after the big bang). This makes no sense on information-theoretic grounds, there are obviously structures and forms in the universe that evolved over time and to say they were present at the beginning seems counterintuitive, as well as dismissive of the actual work of creation.
- One key idea is that this indeterminism is not free will, but provides space for free will to operate.
The idea is not that some events are predetermined and others are random, with neither providing agential control. It's that a pervasive degree of indefiniteness loosens the bonds of fate and creates some room for agents to decide which way things go. (p280)
- Some nods to Bergson and process philosophy, as well as Carlo Rovelli's physics. (p291)
- p151 "holding accountable". The question is, if hard determinism is true, then what happens to morality and the idea that it makes sense to hold people accountable for their actions?
- One answer, but it seems to upset people: morality and accountability do not actually make sense in the way we would like. There is no absolute god-given moral law. In fact the secret is in the very wording above. The law is exactly the act, institution, and practice of holding people accountable.
- It seems like lawyers and politicians are perfectly aware of this, they sort of have to be to practice their craft.
- That is to say, freedom doesn't have much to do with it.
- That is to say, we demand people account for themselves, that they explain their actions. It's not a moral requirement just to not commit crimes, you have to account for yourself. Not just in court, but in everyday interaction.
- Not that people usually give a shit, of course.
- p152? against compatabilism and "poetic naturalism". Not enough for him, although I can't quite understand his objection.
Undetermined - a response to Robert Sapolsky. Part 2 - assessing the scientific evidence https://t.co/O6bwW0Wv3j - no, but yeah, but no though... pic.twitter.com/L7h2TdDRfw
— Kevin Mitchell (@WiringTheBrain) December 28, 2023- with some responses by me
I don't see how this is a well-formed scientific question. Science can reveal (or debunk) various specific causal relationships between natural events. It can't answer metaphysical questions; it doesn't matter if its good science or bad science.
— mtraven (@mtraven) December 29, 2023